Attention deprivation is an affliction Clive Palmer cannot abide. Monday was, thus, shaping as a bad day for Clive.

His new squat in the House of Representatives was closed, and all the focus was being fastened upon the curious and exotic gathering in the new Senate, including the little team assembled by Clive himself: Jacqui Lambie, Glenn Lazarus and Dio Wang, plus, of course, Ricky Muir, the Motoring Enthusiast whose satnav had somehow directed him into Palmer's car park.

Clive, thanks to his own exotic tendencies, has been the centre of attention in the Parliament for months, as he clearly thinks things should be.

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But Senator Lambie was turning out to be anything but lamb-like, having threatened insurrection and suggested she would like to be prime minister - a job coveted by Clive, with approximately the same odds of success - and turned up to her first day in Parliament wearing a blinding canary-yellow jacket that demanded no one missed her.

Worse, she had accepted an invitation to have a happy little chat with Prime Minister Tony Abbott, who only last week she had called a political psychopath.

The mysterious Senator Muir turned out to have a photogenic wife and five children in tow and, as promised, had bought himself a suit, though he had forgotten to have the pants taken up, giving him a fetching, Chaplinesque air.

Senator Lazarus, known during his rugby league days as the brick with eyes, looked exactly like a brick with spectacles, his vastness barely contained by his Senate bench and desk.

Unsurprisingly, the cameras were fixed upon these shocks of the new, rather than Clive, and on other micro-party arrivals like the libertarian David Leyonhjelm of the Liberal Democratic Party, who offered the highly quotable quote that the prospect of being sworn in before the Governor-General ''scared the crap'' out of him.

Clive wasn't about to take any of this oneupmanship lying down.

He repaired to the National Press Club to deliver a nationally televised lunch-time address.

It was a very short address - just 10 minutes - but that wasn't the point. He was talking, the cameras were upon him, scribblers sat with pens poised, and he was prepared to fill out the time by taking questions and loading his answers with jabs at the Abbott government and a thunderer to his pet hate, Queensland Premier Campbell Newman, who he called a Nazi for the second time in a day.

As for negotiating with Abbott about a future emissions trading scheme: ''Well, I don't talk to Abbott.''

By the time Clive was done, the Abbott-Hockey budget appeared close to tatters, even though Palmer's party will wave through the repeal of the carbon tax.

The co-payment to attend a doctor seemed particularly doomed when Clive the billionaire offered a little homily about four female pensioners who had to pool their scarce dollars to go to the movies.

''I couldn't care if we had the biggest debt in the world,'' he said. ''Those ladies are going to have their chocolate and go to the cinema. As simple as that, so hear that, Joe Hockey.''

Clive was back in the spotlight, friend to the poor, and the new Senators were mute, sitting in question time agape at all the hubbub about them.

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The Abbott government's plan to bring on a vote to scrap the carbon tax was delayed on Monday after a day of chaos in the Senate that saw Palmer United Party senators side with the Opposition and Greens to block its first attempt.